Amidst a rapidly evolving political climate, it’s become a challenge for many to keep moving forward. Professor Suzanne Leonard reminds students about the importance of community and the potential to thrive in the face of struggle.
A professor of race, gender and sexuality studies, Leonard is also the program director for the graduate program in Gender and Cultural Studies. Teaching at Simmons University since 2006, she has grown a strong love for the school’s community. She feels that “feminism is in the water” with an “unspoken understanding” of concepts such as gender being a construct or the way power operates.
“It’s such a privilege to be in a room with people who all get it, and I think it gives us a little bit of power to then go out into the world with people who don’t,” Leonard said in an interview with The Voice.
Raised by teachers, she grew up loving English, reading and talking about books. After a brief stint as an editorial assistant at a fitness magazine, Leonard’s father encouraged her to go to graduate school.
She took up a teaching assistant position to help pay for her tuition, which included teaching her own writing classes to first-year students, which sparked an interest in being a professor.
“I loved the fact that they shared their experiences with me,” Leonard said.
Initially hired for a one-year substitute position at Simmons, she ended up teaching full time. The first classes Leonard taught were Art of Film and Gender and Power in Literature, both of which she’s continued to teach.
Leonard’s standout trait as a professor has been her openness to new ideas from the students themselves, particularly with issues surrounding gender. She said having more and more students who identify as trans and non-binary has “given life to the theories” that she’s read about.
“That has just taught me so much more than reading a bunch of queer theorists ever could,” Leonard said.
One of the bigger changes to her teaching was around five years ago when the Black Lives Matter movement was at its peak, encouraging her to reevaluate her own ignorance as a cisgender, white woman who was mainly teaching about other cisgender, white women.
“A lot of academics in the country, but a lot of academics at Simmons, myself included, really started to ask some hard questions about what we were doing in our classrooms and how we were telling the stories of our disciplines to ourselves,” Leonard said.
This realization encouraged her to stop “centering whiteness,” which “has been consistent no matter what class I’m teaching.” It led to her course material being “less alienating, and more diverse and representative in ways that it absolutely had to be.”
Outside of teaching, Leonard maintains the same values and interests in her authorship. She’s written Fatal Attraction (2009), Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the 21st Century (2018) and is currently writing her third book. Leonard has also edited two anthologies and written several articles for academic journals.
“They’re about how our ideas of coupledom, intimacy, sex [and] sexuality are shaped by the popular culture products that we interact with,” Leonard said.
When it comes to parenting, she instills her teachings in her 10-year-old daughter, being honest about the world “without scaring her too much.” Leonard hopes that her daughter will be able to recognize her own privilege much earlier than she did.
Having been part of the local school committee for four years, Leonard feels it’s important to “invest in our local communities,” and wants to model being “socially active” and a “good citizen” for her daughter. It’s also given her a lot of satisfaction making an impact on what’s around her.
Through and through, Leonard approaches life with a love of learning with those around her, existing as a shining beacon of hope to friends, family, students and staff.
